From TM-EX Newsletter, Spring 1992
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NEW YORK
ROARK LETTER
Dear [TM-EX]: This is to confirm to you our previous discussions
regarding my time as Chairman of the Physics Department at Maharishi
International University. As you know, since then I have ceased doing
TM and I am Chairman of the Physics Department at a small liberal
arts college [in the Pacific NW].
During my time at MIU, I had occasion to examine the scientific claims
of the movement, to interact with those who had reportedly performed
the research, to study the metaphysics, philosophy and religion associated
with the TM technique, and to work with the founder of the movement
and the college. It is my certain belief that the many scientific
claims both to factual evidences of unique, beneficial effects of
TM and to theoretical relationships between the experience of TM and
physics are not only without any reasonable basis, but are in fact
in many ways fraudulent. I will briefly try to detail a few of these
errors and false claims in this letter.
While serving on the faculty I discussed the EEG work which purported
to show ``increased brain wave coherence while practising the flying
technique'' with one of the faculty investigators who had participated
in the development of the study, Dr. Michael Dillbeck. My suspicions
were generated by knowing the near impossibility of making EEG measurements
of weak electric signals coming from an array of electrodes attached
to the > subject's scalp while the subject is moving. (The claims
and advertisements show a picture of an apparently ``flying'' meditator
alongside the claimed coherent brain wave pattern. The initial claim
of ``flying'' as my personal experience discovered is merely an energetic
muscular ``hopping.'') The TM investigator confirmed to me that contrary
to the implied claim, the pattern displayed was not of the flying
or hopping meditator since the measurement was indeed impossible.
A similar degree of deception is to be found in the movement's claimed
reduction of crime and other negative social phenomena if enough people
in a country or in the world begin to meditate. Confirmed to me by
investigators at MIU was the suppression of negative evidence that
these investigators had collected. Strong bias was present in selecting
only data favourable to a conclusion that was made prior to the data
collection. Because of the strong authoritarian (essentially cultic)
aspects of the movement, only results supporting ideas generated by
the movement leadership could receive any hearing. The ``scientific
research'' is without objectivity and is at times simply untrue.
While Chairman of Physics at MIU, I was asked to develop a quantum
theory, a unified field theory, which would incorporate consciousness
in such a way as to explain the ``flying'' technique as non-ordinary
and which would give to the subjective experience of meditation a
fundamental role in physics. I found then and I continue to find now
such claims preposterous. This is what is normally called ``crackpot
science.'' Although there is substantial work in the physics of quantum
mechanics giving to consciousness an essential role, even a causal
role, there is no evidence or argument that could connect some sort
of universal consciousness to be subjectively experienced with a unified
field of all physics. In fact, the existing scientific work suggests
just the opposite. If consciousness can be talked about at all with
regard to the physical world, then it must be in the sense of lying
wholly outside of the physical system. Of course quantum mechanical
explanations of ``flying'' in such a way as to suggest that this ``flying''
is an apparent violation of the simpler laws of nature, such as gravity,
is entirely inappropriate because nothing unusual is happening in
the ``flying'' technique which is only hopping. (On the psychological
level, something unusual and probably dangerous is happening during
this and other advanced TM techniques.)
The early attempts to relate the experience of TM to the physical
nature of reality were by fuzzy analogies. Analogous reasoning may
be useful to clarify ideas, but never to establish connecting relationships.
Subsequent attempts to produce some sort of physical theory involving
TM merely carry the analogies further into the realm of obscure thinking
that can perhaps fool the person not conversant with the language
of physics but will be usually quickly described as crackpot by the
expert physicist.
My belief is that TM is in its practise and in its theories religious
in nature and is based on a pantheistic Hinduism that has been reformulated
to make it attractive to Western minds. We in the West have great
respect for science and often look to science and technology to explain
our world and to solve our problems. (We probably have an over-reliance
on science in fact and may turn it into a religion itself.) By TM
claiming to be scientific in a most fundamental way, it tries to demand
of us a respect we reserve for things thought scientific, rational,
efficient, and effective. Under the guise of this false scientific
claim then, Hinduism seeks its entrance into our lives. Many innocent
individuals who sought only for an effective (scientific) relaxation
technique are then exposed to the real dangers of this TM technique
and to the misleading philosophy and metaphysics claimed by its proponents.
Sincerely,
Dennis E. Roark, Ph.D.~